With the current state of identity theft, uncontrolled data collection and targeted marketing, there is a need for a user to protect a primary identity and to compartmentalize online activity. For example, the user might prefer to use a primary identity for general browsing or reading online newspapers, while another identity is used for accessing and commenting on social media, while another identity is used for purchasing from e-commerce applications, and yet another identity is used for selling furniture on an electronic commerce web site.
One method to achieve this separation (or compartmentalization) is to allow a user to create multiple synthetic identities and then use them for different purposes. Each synthetic identity (also known as a persona) has its own identity attributes which may include name, address, date of birth, phone, email, credit and delivery address. Each synthetic identity should be used for a limited and specific purpose, so that tracking of that identity would not form a complete picture of the user's activity.
This is shown in FIG. 1 where a real user 100 has a number of synthetic identities 102, 104, 106 and 108 that are used to protect their primary identity when accessing Internet services 110. The synthetic identities act as a personal privacy proxy, insulating the Internet services access to the user's primary identity.
There does not necessarily need to be a one to one relationship between a primary identity and synthetic identity. It may be more suitable for two people to share a synthetic identity, e.g., in a family situation, or for a synthetic identity to represent a larger group, e.g., sporting team or company.
One difficulty when creating a new synthetic identity is that there is insufficient available evidence to prove it can be trusted. That is, because there is no way to demonstrate a history of legitimate transactions, people and service providers may not be willing to interact with the synthetic identity.
Illustrating the problem, organizations such as eBay® provide a reputation service for buyers and sellers that allow two parties that don't know each other to interact with some confidence. Buyers and sellers can rate each other at the end of a transaction, and these ratings build a reputation score. A positive review will increase the reputation score and a negative review will decrease the reputation score.
The first problem with this approach to reputation is that it is a closed system. The identities and reputation scores are not trusted outside of the closed ecosystem. For example, even if a person has built a strong reputation with one service, that reputation is not transferable to another service. A second problem is that there is no objective measure of how a reputation is obtained as it is based mainly on personal opinion.
Therefore, it would be desirable to have an objective measure and open methodology for creating a reputation. This is true for primary identities, but it is significantly more pronounced for synthetic identities. There is a need for a new decentralized approach to reputation that allows synthetic identities to build a reputation that can be trusted in a variety of situations. Such a system should allow one to search for an identity's reputation with corresponding strong evidence on how it was calculated.